Obama can live with Libya rebuke

The House vote Friday to condemn President Barack Obama’s Libya policy was an historic rejection of a commander-in-chief at war — but it’s a rebuke the White House can live with.

Back in 2008, the notion that Obama, who was portrayed by both Hillary Rodham Clinton and John McCain as a dangerous naïf when it came to foreign policy, would ever be attacked by Republicans for flexing too much military muscle would have seemed far-fetched.

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But that’s what happened on Friday, with Clinton, now secretary of state, lashing Republicans on Obama’s behalf and McCain emerging as a passionate defender of the president’s Libya policy.

House Republicans, 225 of them, joined dozens of liberal antiwar Democrats led by 2008 peace candidate Dennis Kucinich in defeating a bill that would have authorized “limited” military action in Libya.

But an hour later the GOP’s collective resolve weakened as the House decisively voted down the means of stopping the intervention they had just condemned - a measure that would have blocked funding for the three-month old campaign to oust Muammar Qadhafi.

The second vote, one administration official told POLITICO, “was an acknowledgement that what we’re doing there is important and worth supporting.”

The White House may not have conquered, but it was happy enough to divide. And Obama’s press secretary Jay Carney – sounding a lot like a Bush White House spokesman hitting Democrats opposing the Iraq war – wasted little time in tackling Republicans who rejected continuing the Libya mission.

“We think now is not the time to send the kind of mixed message that it sends when we are working with our allies to achieve the goals that we believe that are widely shared in Congress, that — protecting civilians in Libya, enforcing a no-fly zone, enforcing an arms embargo and further putting pressure on Qadhafi,” Carney told reporters flying on Air Force One.

Just as importantly, it masked equally deep divisions among Democrats and provided Obama cover for a policy with no clear end-point, an intervention even administration allies admit has been poorly explained to the public and to lawmakers.

““We don’t have enough wars going on?” asked Kucinich, an Ohio Democrat during Friday’s floor debate. “We have to wage war against another nation which did not attack us?”

Clinton and lower-level Obama aides lobbied Democrats hard in the hours leading up to the funding vote to prevent a far more embarrassing defeat.

In the end, many in both parties backed Obama, despite deep reservations. Rep. Jeff Flake, a conservative Republican from Arizona, voted with the Obama administration on both bills, but wasn’t happy about it.

“The president still has not made clear what national security objectives are being met by U.S. participation in the NATO mission or how we can justify spending hundreds of millions of dollars to fund our efforts there,” said Flake.

“The time for debate over whether to authorize U.S. armed forces to engage in Libya was months ago, before the U.S. entered into the NATO operation.”